Keyboard 94

Bassist Hellborg, drummer Anders Johansson, and keyboardist Jens
Johansson enjoy equal time in the spotlight on this raw trio set. Jens
does all his work on organ, mainly with Leslie off and minimal changes
in registration. The organ's overdriven growl obliterates any soft spots
overlooked by his colleagues' thrashing exertions. When played this loud
and at these tempos, glitches are embarrasingly audible and solos can
stumble over the slightest technical hiccups. But Johansson has the
right combination of aggression, imagination and command to shine in
this setting. Nothing trips him up: He and Hellborg devour unison lines
with an almost gleeful virtuosity. On his own, Johansson plays with a
volatile combination of power and precision: Listening to his solo on
"Dog bar-B-Q" or in the last eight bars of "Mouteadne" is like watching
a bull stampede through a house of mirrors. Images of Emerson flash past
as tempos hit Mach One, and after it's over Johansson stands unscarred.
The new acid jazz label doesn't quite fit here. Rather, Hellborg and
company resemble children of a menage a trois involving prog, punk and
old man fusion. With such a lineage, it's no wonder this album sounds so
dangerous.

Musician

This is a reproduction of a text that appeared in Musician in July 1992,
written by the eminent Matt Resnicoff.

Jens Johansson, Swede in motionSurviving Yngwie, on the subway
upward

Through the tunnel, across industrial backstreets, up the stairs and
inching toward dawn, the sound of a man working gets louder and louder.
Anders Johansson is banging a ladder with drumsticks  not to fix the
ladder, not to fix the landlord's wagon, but to delight Jonas Hellborg,
who hunches over Greenpoint Studio's console with his ponytail swinging
in the faders. The decide they need a click track for an overdub but
can't bother with the drum machine, so the younger Johansson,
keyboardist Jens, punches at a fierce-looking machine in the wall,
securing a button with duct tape so that a metronomic tick raps into his
brother's headphones. Things get very quiet as Anders takes polyrythmic
liberties and finishes his solo album. Jonas, a most accomplished bass
subversive, is delighted. He retrieves another master tape and plays
back the assembled trio's recent work  some of the heaviest metal
going, and a harsh, harmonically deep respite from their individual
credits: Mahavishnu, Yngwie Malmsteen, Ronnie James Dio. The three
Swedes are smiling.

You would rightly suggest that after experiencing Malmsteen, the
Johanssons can play or endure just about anything. In the balcony at his
first Yngwie show since departing the band, Jens grimaces at the
guitarist's profane patter and drunken stage behavior. "This sounds like
Survivor," he laughs; surveying backstage antics after the show, he gets
depressed by the vapidity of the entourage, the contrived corporate
sludge mentality that robbed the music of its fire. "There's no chaos;
there's too much control here, in the band, in the sound," he says.
"When we first came over frome Sweden, people were interested because we
were doing something different."

Jens isn't strictly versed in the discipline of music theory 
fist-slamming a digital reverb in his bedroom a few days later, he
betrays even less patience with technology  though his music is
happily twisted and his manned irreverent enough to allow him to move
from Yngwie's demanding harmonic minor- and diminished-based dungeon
rock to spare textures or traditional acoustic piano for Ginger. To grab
the listener, he shapes his phrasing to emulate the fluidity of the
human voice, and he relies on the pitchwheel for formal bending and as
an organic substitute for programmed vibrato; he uses guitar effects to
offset the static quality of most synthesizer generators.

Still, Jens is a calm savage with minimal interest in every current
synth player except Steve Hunt, and that refined taste represents the
tip of a deep reserve. On a subway one afternoon, he noticed that the
two beeping tones accompanying the closing train doors descended a major
third, and that both cars surrounding his own followed that same
pattern, beginning on different notes. He memorized them and wrote out
the resulting sequence  three cars, six notes, two triads, and the
kernel for "A Mote in God's Eye," the opening epic on Jens'
Fjäderlösa Tvåfotingar. He worked the theme through several
chords based on that parallel motion, beginning on a chord voiced A, D,
E, then another a major third down, F, A#, C  both over C#; for the
second sequence, he puts a C bass note under the A chord to create a
dissonant minor second against the C#, and an F# under the F. The
progression moves through F#, B, C#/A, to E, A, B/F, then drops a
half-step: E-flat, A flat, B flat/F#. The bass notes are set up to
create very deliberate tensions.

Jens writes music on a computer program called Cubase, which stores
entire orchestrations and allows him to modify specific parts without
disturbing the whole. He advises composers who use sequencing programs
to turn off the screen when listening back to their arrangements. "When
you see the parts coming up you listen to it in a completely different
manner," he says. "You see this two-dimensional picture of your piece
with different parts, in a linear sequence; it's different from the
one-dimensional thing you get when you're just listening and don't know
what came before or after. You're at one particular point in time, and
on the screen you don't feel that atmosphere."

He hails up a neoclassical opus from his hard disk, complete with drums
and simulated rythm guitar, that sounds good enough to be a record. It
might turn into one; he's thinking of doing a group of such tunes to
cash in on the visibility he gained with Yngwie, where he had the
distinction of providing an integral second lead voice alongside the
egomaniacal guitarist. If Yngwie was generous with Jens' solo time, the
generosity stopped there; though he quit years ago, the keyboardist says
he noticed at least one uncredited section of his own music on
Malmsteen's latest CD. And though his fusillades in that band often
pushed into the complex realm of heavy fusion, particularly on early
pieces like Rising Force's "Far Beyond the Sun" and "Little Savage,"
Jens finds soloing fiendishly difficult to explain. He's trying to
overwhelm his ears rather than his hands.

"The physical barriers are there," he says, "but I tend to think it's
all the same, the psychological and the physical. There's so many
barriers that you shouldn't really separate them. But if you do, the
psychological's the worse, because you tend to like things you've heard
before and you have to make yourself do weird things. You learn to like
things more than you did when you first tried them out, but that's part
of the charm of developing."

Swede toots

Jens' main board is a modified Korg Poly Six with painted keys, a sanded
silver panel and the sound he says endures through it all. Also on hand
are an Oberheim Matrix-12, two Matrix 1000s and a DPX-1 sampleplayer.
There's also a Korg CX-3 organ, aLeslie and a MiniMoog, in storage back
in L.A. since before the Yngwie blowout and the Dio gig. He uses a Korg
PME40X modular effects unit for color, and composes on an Atari 1040 ST
computer with the Cubase sequencing program, MIDI'd to a Roland D-20 and
whatever other synths he has available  especially that Poly Six.

Keyboard 88

This was another feature.. had some transcriptions as well... I scanned
these a long time ago so you can look at them
here and
here..

Keyboard Magazine (October 1988, Page 54. By Freff)

OFF THE RECORD

JENS JOHANSSON Gives Yngwie Malmsteen a run for his money

The prototypical heavy metal hero is a guitarist playing in one of three
gears: fast, incredibly fast, or fast beyond mortal ken. Other
instrumentalists need not apply. The six-string pyrotechnicians lord it
over the leather'n'chain roost, and keyboards (assuming they're used at
all) are relegated strictly to a supporting role.

One blistering exception to this rule is Swedish keyboardist Jens
Johansson, whose work with Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Force proves
that what counts in heavy metal is attitude, not instrument. Onstage he
holds his own using an Oberheim Matrix-12 as his main controller,
driving a rack of MIDI modules that include a Matrix-6R, DPX-1 sample
player, and Korg DSM-1 sampler. In the studio, however, he prefers to
avoid MIDI work, feeling that most synths don't respond rapidly enough
to incoming data: "For soloing and stuff they just feel kind of
sluggish." That would never do when trading lines with Yngwie, as in
this series of synth and guitar phrases taken from the instrumental
"Krakatau," on Rising Force's latest record, Odyssey (Polydor, 835
451-1). Jens' lines were recorded in one night, using a Korg PolySix
with some distrortion and flanging. In fact, all of Jens' solos on
Odyssey were recorded in one night. "We were recording in Austin, Texas,
and I had a few cappucinos before the session so I was kind of wired
from that. I remember we were flying to New Jersey* the next day, and I was convinced that
the plane was going to fall down, so I thought I'd better get all the
solos done right then."

Yngwie's guitar parts are notated at actual pitch, instead of the
standard octave above actual pitch. On the recording his guitar is tuned
down a half-step (Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb), and he is fingering his lines in E
minor.

The solo has a quarter note = 66 feel, but we've notated it at half note
= 66 to make it clearer. (Incessant 64th notes and 32nd-note septuplets
have a way of looking like sanskrit.) The first 24 bars are played over
a Bb dominant riff, and the rest over an Eb tonic. We stopped when Jens
did, and didn't transcribe the eight bars of Yngwie's final response.

Jens has deliberately adapted and restricted his playing to impart a
"guitar" feel to his lines. He stays within the same range as a guitar,
bends pitch by whole steps, and adds on-the-beat grace notes that sound
like pull-offs. The notes marked under slurs in his phrases are probably
pitch bends.

The squiggle notation in measures 31-32 is an obscure symbol from the
Swedish classical tradition, which can be taken to mean "Yngwie smokes."
Seriously, if anyone out there can accurately notate those measures,
call us. We might just have a job for you.